06.07.08
Posted in Environment & Energy, Fair Trade, Health & Education, Human Rights, Social Innovation & Mission Driven Entrepreneurship at 9:33 am by Oliver
At an event of the World Affairs Council in San Francisco last week, I had the chance to meet Wilford Welch and learn about his new book “The Tactics of Hope”.
In a nutshell, The Tactics of Hope is a call to action for individuals who are concerned about global issues such as poverty, human rights, social justice, and environmental sustainability but are not clear what steps they might best take to move from concern to effective action. The Tactics of Hope provides support and inspires by telling 27 stories of social entrepreneurs and their creative, powerful initiatives.
At the event, I also spoke to Priya Haji, one of the featured entrepreneurs in the book. Priya is co-founder and CEO of World of Good, a company that distributes handcrafted products made by artisans in developing countries. Besides the companies fair trade practices, 10% of World of Good’s profits go to its nonprofit foundation, which seeks to improve the standard of living of the artisans. World of Good supports 5,680 artisans who in turn have nearly 23,000 dependents. 75% of them are women. With the eBay partnership I was writing about in a post yesterday, World of Good will be able to leverage eBay’s technology and increase its scale and impact tremendously.
At the event, Tactics of Hope contributing editor David Hopkins presented the beta version of the application he was developing. In line with the book, the goal of this tool is to connect website visitors to organizations and other individuals around the world, who want to discover their own tactics of hope and take action to address the most pressing challenges of our time.
Of course you can buy the book online. To get it signed, however, you’ll need to meet Wilford and his team at one of the book stores listed here.
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06.06.08
Posted in Fair Trade, Social Innovation & Mission Driven Entrepreneurship at 1:07 pm by Oliver
At the Dow Jones Environmental Ventures conference in San Mateo, CA, Robert Chatwani, eBay’s General Manager for WorldofGood.com participated a panel, discussing “Which Technologies Will Get the Green Light?” The panelists recognized that consumer purchases of green products and services are increasing and therefore, I wanted learn more about eBay’s partnership with World Of Good.
World of Good is a mission driven business that engages people in changing the world through commerce that alleviates poverty and benefits the environment. So far, World of Good sells fair traded handicraft through its a network of 1,300 US based stores. The collaboration with eBay will provide World them with an advanced community platform and a marketplace with global reach. By leveraging eBay’s technology, World Of Good will be able to scale it’s business to an extend unheard of in the fair trade community.
I find it fascinating, that sometimes there are partnerships that just make a lot of sense. And without doubt, the collaboration between eBay and World of Good, two companies that seem to share a common vision of creating positive change through commerce, has tremendous potential. To safeguard fair trade practices, the future World Of Good online store will not follow eBay’s traditional auction model.
As you know, Worldsight’s mission is to bring together all stakeholders of mission driven businesses or programs. So no matter whether you are a big corporation, a small startup, a service provider, or an NGO, please let us know how we can help you scale your business or help you create a meaningful partnership.
To learn more about “Robert Chatwani, eBay’s Greenest Rising Star” make sure to read Treehugger’s interview with him from earlier this year.
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